On a warm, dry morning in June, Casey Miller began his shift at Sparks Fire Station 1 by spending about an hour on a thorough equipment inventory.
With an affable efficiency, Miller showed KUNR around the rig he’d been assigned to for this 48-hour rotation, explaining the steps crews must take to make sure they’re ready for the next call as he went.
“Just want to make sure the blood pressure cuff and the pulse oximetry is in there,” he said, as he flipped through the contents of a heavy bag of emergency medical equipment. “I think the last call they had was a little kiddo, because this is our pediatric pulse [oximeter].”
Miller has been a firefighter for the City of Sparks for over two years. He didn’t originally plan on this career — he told KUNR he’d been interested in sports medicine while he was working on his degree at UNR — but once he learned it was an option, he was hooked.
“I played a lot of sports growing up, and so it's kind of like that, man. You come hang out, run calls, you work out, you cook. I'm cooking tonight, so that's terrifying,” he said with a self-effacing chuckle.
Miller and his colleagues are committed to serving the community. But soon, they may have to make some hard decisions about how they deploy their resources. That’s because, in order to balance the budget, Sparks City Council is laying off more than a dozen employees. Half those cuts come from Sparks Fire.
But according to fire apparatus operator Mike Szopa, there was no fat to trim.
“It's going to have an impact, for sure,” he said.
Szopa is also vice president of the firefighters’ union, and works at the same station as Miller. He said at the end of the month, the Sparks Fire Department will lose its five newest recruits to those layoffs — right before they were supposed to start working full time. They’d been hired to backfill positions in a department that’s been understaffed since the Great Recession.
Meanwhile, Szopa estimated calls for service have tripled.
So he’s concerned that as fewer firefighters run more calls, they’ll start seeing long term consequences like burnout.
“We have to balance our personal safety and well-being with what we're doing, because we need to be at the top of our game at two o'clock in the morning when someone calls for their child who is choking,” Szopa said.
Sparks City Manager Dion Louthan acknowledged the cuts will come at a cost. But Sparks was saddled with a deficit of around $18 million for the current fiscal year. And with labor costs making up nearly 80% of the city budget, Louthan said they had no choice.
“Our expenses in roughly a five-year period, from [2020] to [2025], went up 54%,” he said.
At the same time, tax revenue hasn’t kept pace. Reno and Washoe County are dealing with the same challenges, but Sparks got it the worst.
Louthan said that’s because Sparks has a much smaller budget than its neighbors, and is more susceptible to economic uncertainty.
“When it comes to these swings that we have, we tend to feel them first,” he explained.
Meanwhile, in Reno, City Manager Jackie Bryant said there are no plans for layoffs.
“It has a significant impact to morale. It has a significant impact to the ability to provide services to this community, and it also has a significant impact to the people that we are entrusted with taking care of,” she said.
For now, Reno has been able to balance its budget by freezing some positions, and using one-time funding, such as proceeds from property sales. But once that money’s spent, it’s gone. And city staff expect another deficit for the coming fiscal year.
Local officials still have to respond to national trends, too.
For example, Washoe County Chief Financial Officer Abigail Yacoben said inflation means people are spending less — which is part of why sales tax revenue isn’t keeping pace. At the same time, it also drives up costs for the county.
“The project that we said would cost $100 million last year, may be $105 million this year,” Yacoben said.
Just like in Reno, county officials want to keep staff employed. But with more economic uncertainty on the horizon, all three jurisdictions could be making more tough decisions next spring.
